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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Most of us are Pirates these days!

I am not a great subscriber….I tend to leach off the freebies
Recently, however, I took out digital subs for both LRB and NYRB. And the rates of a slightly more academic journal I have loved since the 70s – "Political Quarterly" – are so reasonable (15 euros for not only 4 quarterly editions but also the entire archives) that I was also seduced by them last year. 
For a few months even I managed to get the full daily edition of "Le Monde" – until they cottoned on to the fact that my payment had not actually gone through…

So it’s not altogether surprising that, these past few days, I’ve been looking again at the list (which was one of several annexes of To Whom it May Concern – the 2019 posts) of the journals I considered worth reading.
And that I actually took out yet another sub.
Have a look at the updated list below and see whether you can guess which new title I succumbed to!!

The list which I had compiled all of three years ago had started with a not altogether unjustified crack about the superficiality of newspaper coverage. That, in turn, raised the question of which (English language) journals would pass a test  with such criteria as –
- Depth of treatment
- Breadth of coverage (not just political)
- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)
- clarity of writing
- sceptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews,  – and the occasional glance at the New YorkerNew Statesman; and Spiked.

Other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above are -
Aeon; an interesting new (since 2012) cultural journal
Arts and Letters Daily; daily internet roundup from books and articles 
Book Forum; a bit too US centred for my taste…..
Brain Pickings; a superb personal internet bi-weekly endeavour which gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. One of the best
Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag and this article on development
Dissent; a US leftist stalwart whose recent analyses of ecological issues have been exemplars of typology
Eurozine; terrific stuff from a European network of 70 odd cultural journals
Jacobin; a rather too predictable US leftist mag with a poor literary style
Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts
London Review of Books; couldn’t do without it!
Los Angeles Review of Books; great addition to book reviews from global cites (eg Boston, Dublin) 
Monthly Review; an old leftist US stalwart with well-written and solid analysis
Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive
N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags
New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought
New Left Review; THE rather academic UK bi-monthly journal which I’ve dipped into ever since it started in 1960 
New Republic; solid US monthly
Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly
The American Prospect (US); ditto US
Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette – a very new journal emphasising “free thought” whose pieces are very well-written 
Resurgence ; UK Green mag
Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism
Slate; more right wing internet venture
Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste
Spiked; a very strange journal whose staff came from the "Living Marxism" group and adopt counter-intuitive attitudes to issues. See the useful http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=124 for more
The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Baffler; highly original leftist US bimonthly running for 30 years which I’ve only  noticed recently
The Critic - a new journal (since the end of 2019) opposed to the cosy “left-liberal consensus” it considers disfigures the british chattering classes. A bit parti-pris
The Conversation; a rare venture which has academics writing more journalistically 
The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community
The New York Review of Books; a fortnightly I’ve been reading avidly for the past 30 years
The New Yorker; very impressive US writing
The Point – a relatively new venture (5 years) which advertises itself as “the magazine of the examined life”
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns
Wired; unpredictable - often has very good material

The answer to the question I posed earlier    is...... most curiously, The Point – as well, after a hiccup, as The New Yorker – the latter offering last week a 4 month internet sub (with archival material) for only 6 dollars. I have to declare, however, that - after a full week - I’ve still not been able to activate access to that delight. Serves me right for succumbing to an offshoot of the Conde mulinational!!!! 
But the digital version of “The Point” is already available - for only 31 dollars a year……..

I confess that I still have fond memories in the 1980s of "The Encounter" mag which was shockingly revealed later in the decade to have been partially funded by the CIA and which as a result shut up shop in 1990....I still have some copies in the glass-covered cabinet in the mountain house study (on the left of the pic).......
The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.
European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.


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